Communication devices, such as mobile phones or computers, have become important devices in our daily life. Such electronic devices can now all provide data connections. These connections may be enabled for instance through 3G or now 4G radio telecommunication networks, LAN or wireless network such as WiFi or WLAN networks.
Thanks to these data connections, users can exchange digital information, notably through the social networks such as Facebook™ or LinkedIn™. The digital information may comprise user personal information or data such as for instance name, age, home and work address, phone numbers, emails, pictures, work experience, daily blogging . . . Privacy associated to these personal data is becoming more and more of an issue.
Indeed, one of the properties of digital information is that it may be infinitely copied without loss. This property, while enabling the production and distribution of vast amounts of content, audio and video, also leads to privacy issues when personal data is concerned. Once persisted in digital form, personal data can be readily disseminated beyond the scope of its original disclosure.
Social networks have addressed that issue by defining access rules to personal data based on the social graphs. Provided a first user is tagged as a known user by a second user (notion of friends in the Facebook™ or contacts or connections on LinkedIn™), the first user will have access to the second user digital information, including his personal data.
Facebook™ has recently introduced the notion of different levels of connections, based for instance on how close the first user is to the second, like close friend, family, work friend . . . but the ranking of the connections is still based on user's input. Google Circle™ has also defined conditional access rules between users based on their Gmail™ correspondences.
Whether these access rules are based on user input or some ways of measuring the solidity of users connection, the rules will give full access to the personal data if matched. Then, nothing can prevent the friend or connection to freely disseminate these data. There is no existing solution today addressing the dissemination and the persistent character of personal data once in digital form.
Today there is still a need for a simple solution that allows a user to protect his personal data from dissemination. There is a further need for a solution that can be easily implemented to protect user personal data.